Considering users’ different knowledge about products to improve a UX evaluation method based on mental models

Abstract

User experience (UX) evaluation and design have become important components of the product development process. The UX describes the users’ subjective perceptions, responses and emotional reactions while interacting with products or services, considering users’ emotions and cognitive activities as the basic elements of the experience. The emotions encompass physiological, affective, behavioral, and cognitive components; the cognitive activities generate and exploit the mental models that govern the human behavior. The literature offers several methods to evaluate the UX; one of them, the irMMs-based method, considers both users’ emotions and mental models to evaluate the quality of the UX. Nevertheless, its current release misses the contribution of users who already know the product under evaluation. This research aims at improving the irMMs-based method by considering also users familiar with those products. The expected benefits of this improvement refer to the completeness of the evaluation results and to the definition of relationships between these results and the evaluation activities that allow them to be discovered. All of this can be useful for both researchers and designers who are willing to increase their knowledge about the generation and exploitation of mental models and to select the most suitable evaluation activities to perform time by time depending on the characteristics of the results they are interested in and on the resources available.